


My Dear Husband

by cotton_prima



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Game(s), hurt without comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 14:37:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19993846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cotton_prima/pseuds/cotton_prima
Summary: Months after Robin sacrifices herself to defeat Grima, Frederick finally does some housekeeping. He finds a letter.





	My Dear Husband

The letter was in the last of her strategy journals.

Frederick had put off sorting through her things for as long as he could. The two crates sat heavily between his bed and dresser, an eyesore in his otherwise orderly quarters. After six months, he could no longer justify the space they took up. It was time, he decided, to take stock—what to keep and what to let go. Regardless of how ready he was.

Unsurprisingly, most of her possessions were books. Books of tactics, history, topography, and, somewhat bizarrely, a trilogy of thin novels titled “Wyvern Wars.” These he would donate to the castle library. Her set of quills and inks could still be used. He lightly lifted out the folded coat and placed it on the bed. He would keep that. A hairbrush, a gauzy pouch filled with dried lavender, a pot of rouge she’d worn a handful of times, a battered chess set. He was unsure of what to do with these. He set them on the side, then put them back in the crate. He would return to them later.

Then there was her entire stack of journals, thin folios that she had stitched together herself during their campaigns. These he paged through. Most of their contents were negligible to one without a mind for tactics, though Morgan might have made something out of them. A great deal of the rest of it was mundane. List after outdated list, a tallying of expenses, notes on the weather. But every now and again there was something personal, some small anecdote. He found a page from an early journal that listed “chicken, pork, beef, mutton, venison, crocodile, bear.” Frederick lingered over the silly string of words, fondly tracing where her eager hand had smudged the ink.

The letter was written on a standard parchment page, folded down the middle with one clean crease. It looked so much like her other notes that he almost didn’t open it. He wasn’t prepared for what he found when he did.

“My dear husband,” it read in tidy script.

That was all it read.

He stared at the blank page that was addressed to him, all the air in his chest suddenly cold. He placed the letter atop the stack of journals where it looked slight and innocuous. Time passed, and he stared at it still, as if its missing words would reveal themselves. He knew with a terrible certainty when she had written it and the decision she had made after tucking it into her journal.

He exhaled, his breath long and low. It was strange. Months ago, right after it had happened, he had hoped to find something like this, some hidden trace of her meant for only him. But he had been afraid, too. He had thought finding something like this would break him, his heart brittle with grief as it was. So he hadn’t looked, not really. And the two crates had sat in his quarters, the only things he allowed to collect dust. But now he had it—the thing meant for only him. He didn’t feel broken. He didn’t know what to feel.

“My dear husband,” he thought. She had never referred to him so formally before. She had hardly been able to call him “husband” without her face tightening.

“It feels wrong,” she had explained shortly after their marriage. “It’s distant. It feels like I’m hiding from you.”

He understood better now than he had then. Had she been trying to hide from him? Behind the word “husband?” Behind a sheet of paper? Behind death itself? No, those were uncharitable, bitter thoughts. She would not have done that. Some distance, then. Enough to address him objectively and belatedly, to clear a space for everything else she needed to say. At least, that must have been her original intent.

_My dear husband._

How careful she had been. Through all of her journals, her penmanship had never been so exact. He imagined her, sitting very upright at her table, smoothing the page out in front of her, dipping her quill into the inkpot. It would have been late at night—she would have had no time during the day—and she would have set a lantern on her desk. _My dear husband_ , she had written slowly. And then she had stopped. She had waited long enough for the ink to dry, then she had decisively folded the page tucked it into her journal, never to be finished or delivered.

Why?

She had wanted to leave something behind. Not an explanation. She had explained her choice to him and no one else. Why love and duty bade her leave him. And, as a knight should, he had given her his blessing against his heart. But if not an explanation, then what was the letter for? What had she wanted to tell him? She must have known that this would be her last chance, her final words to him. He wanted her to speak comfort to him through the page. He wanted her to be with him now, even after she was long, long gone. He would have accepted anything. Any small thing.

He hadn’t even been with her when she died.

_My dear husband._ He imagined those words in her voice, which grew quieter in his mind with each passing day. _This blank page is for you._ _This emptiness is for the rest of your days._

Had she truly nothing to say to him?

Frederick snatched up the letter, taken by a sudden impulse to destroy it. What good was an empty letter to him? One that the writer herself had not even delivered? Hadn’t even finished? The paper dimpled under his grip. He ought to rip the damned thing apart.

_My dear._

But he couldn’t. If he were stronger, perhaps. But incomplete though it was, the letter was something she had left for him. He could not bring himself to destroy it and lose another trace of her. There was no way to know what she had meant by it or what she would have written. That would have to be enough. He had no other choice but to accept it.

A difficult smile worked its way upon his face. One empty page or a hundred pages swimming in ink—what difference would it have made? He wanted her, not her ghost. Mere words would not return her. They could only remind him that she was gone.

Perhaps she had realized that. Perhaps that was why she’d abandoned her project after just a few words. Still, he couldn’t help but cling to what little she had left behind. It was painful and lonely to hold on, but he feared the pain that would come with letting go. He feared even more that there might be no pain at all, that one day he might open the letter and feel nothing, not even the ache of an old scar. She would be gone then. Really, truly gone.

“You are unfair,” he said softly, folding the letter up again. 

The letter said nothing back.


End file.
